


Heads or Tails

by GoldStarGrl



Category: Justified
Genre: Outlaw!Willa and Fed!Zachariah, Post-Series, Vignette
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-16
Updated: 2020-03-16
Packaged: 2021-03-01 02:55:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 925
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23178046
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GoldStarGrl/pseuds/GoldStarGrl
Summary: Willa Givens grows up to be beautiful. Zachariah Crowder grows up to be smart.Watch the coin as it goes up in the air. There’s a fifty-fifty chance of how it lands.
Comments: 5
Kudos: 22





	Heads or Tails

**Author's Note:**

> Look in ten years we're going to have a Justified revival of Raylan and Boyd's kids facing off and y'all are gonna be like "GoldStarGrl, you were so ahead of the times to write this hasty drabble while you ate dinner" and I'll be like "yes, I know."

Willa Givens grows up to be beautiful, long honey-colored hair she sweeps up in a high, bouncing ponytail, a smirk that makes whoever it’s aimed at a little weak in the knees. In a city where beauty is often confused for spray tans and bleached hair, she’s the real deal. This surprises no one, especially not when they get an eyeful of her father.

Zachariah Crowder (well, Zachariah Dean, if you’re looking at certain legal forms) grows up to be smart, and in California there’s a better chance that gets noticed by the right people. He skips two grades, gets into three Ivies. This doesn’t surprise his mother, though it does make her a little nervous.

Watch the coin as it goes up in the air. There’s a fifty-fifty chance of how it lands.

...

Willa first stole something out of the evidence room when she was twelve. Just a little bag of weed. Her daddy never even suspected it, never a shadow crossed his eye as the Miami Marshals tore the place apart. Zach learns to shoot a gun from the elderly man at the farm next door, who has always been sweet to him, feels bad he doesn’t have a father. He’s not very good at it. 

Willa charms her way out of doing any real work in high school and takes up smoking when she’s sure she won’t get caught. Zach decides to attend UC Irvine, to be closer to his mother, and because they have an excellent Criminal Justice program. 

Givens and Crowders, Crowders and Givens. They’re two sides of a nickel flipping in the sunlight. 

...

Willa hasn't been to Kentucky since she was six months old. Zach's never set foot there. She doesn’t have a lot of time for boyfriends, spends most weekends getting philandering old men at hotel bars to hand over their credit cards. He falls into bed with every pretty smile that comes his way, can’t keep a girlfriend for more than three weeks. 

Willa wears hard-soled black boots every day, even with her most flowery dresses, and the men who move her coke and pills whisper that she uses them to kick people’s teeth in when they’ve come up short on payment. Zach wears a blue windbreaker with _FBI_ printed on the back, and the first time his mother sees him in it she bursts into tears and won’t tell him why.

...

Willa is great at math, at getting money and making more of it. At washing every bill clean. Zachariah is shrewd, obsesses over a slim file out of Florida, the woman who has technically never been busted for anything, not even expired tags on her convertible. 

She owns four clubs suspected as fronts for money laundering. He’s the only one in the office that always takes out the word _suspected._

Other agents tease him about having a crush. 

She knows who Agent Zachariah Crowder is. Makes it her business to keep an eye on men like her daddy, because they never know when to quit. She likes his focused eyes, his work shirts buttoned all the way to the top.

No one who works for her would ever dare accuse her of having a crush.

...

Two ends of one red tether, and nobody will even tell them they’re tied up. 

It’s almost three decades before they start feeling the tug. Historically, that’s about as long as the two halves can stand to stay away from each other. 

...

Willa Givens is twenty-nine when she gets stopped on a private runway outside Miami, wind whipping her hair, her chartered jet just ten feet away. Zachariah Crowder is twenty-seven and tackles her to the cement without taking his gun out of his holster. He would’ve missed anyway.

There’s an old Greek myth that posits humans were originally born with two heads, four arms and legs. The gods feared their power and split them, scattering the pieces around the world. We’re left to wander the earth, looking for our other half.

Sometimes they do find each other, again. Sometimes they find each other over and over and over. 

There’s usually less blood, but not with Crowders and Givens.

...

Willa asks Zach if he’s ever been to Mexico. Zach tells Willa he didn’t bring his passport. 

The bruise she left on his jaw doesn't smart that badly.

Willa’s daddy picks up the phone to call a prison in Eastern Kentucky for the first time in decades, because when he's lost his footing, the voice on the other end is what reorients him. Zach’s mama does the same thing, because fuck it, her fears of his life being ruined are already in motion.

They both hang up before they can get connected to the one man who might know what to do. They both know he’d laugh and laugh and laugh.

...

Willa Givens and Zachariah Crowder have never dug coal together. 

On opposite coasts, Willa saw drugs and bright neon lights and knew for a woman to get anything in life, even one as beautiful as her, she had to take it herself. Zach had calm, rolling hills and sunshine all year long and, smart as he was, held naive dreams of being the kind of man who could make the whole world feel that safe. 

Willa nips Zach’s neck. He closes his eyes and exhales through his nose. The sun is going down over the tarmac.

The coin can always land on the same side twice in a row, of course. But the chances it’ll reverse are just as great.


End file.
